DOD to call back furloughed workers

The Pentagon is calling many of its furloughed civilian employees back to work after concluding Congress gave Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel enough authority to pay them during the government shutdown.

Congress passed an 11th-hour bill just before the government closure that permitted Hagel to pay active-duty troops, some civilians and contractors, but it took nearly a week for Defense and Justice Department lawyers to determine how many of the 400,000 furloughed workers Hagel could protect.

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“We have tried to exempt as many DoD civilian personnel as possible from furloughs. We will continue to try to bring all civilian employees back to work as soon as possible,” Hagel said in a statement. “Ultimately, the surest way to end these damaging and irresponsible furloughs, and to enable us to fulfill our mission as a department, is for Congress to pass a budget and restore funds for the entire federal government.”

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Rand Beers also said Saturday that he would begin calling back furloughed civilian workers who support the Coast Guard, under authority granted by the same law. Beers said he expected DHS could “significantly reduce – but not completely eliminate,” the Coast Guard’s civilian furloughs.

The exact number of workers who will return during the shutdown remained unclear Saturday afternoon.

Hagel also threw his support behind a measure that passed the House on Saturday that would provide back pay for the more than 800,000 federal workers furloughed due to the shutdown in effect since Tuesday.

Saturday’s decision came after significant pressure from congressional Republicans, who argued that the Defense Department has been exacerbating its own shutdown pain in order to ramp up the pressure on conservatives in Congress. Republicans demand that any bill to fund the whole government also include provisions undermining Obamacare.

Their message all week was that the troop-pay bill deliberately gave DoD lots of leeway, so the department should use it.

“The president has abused his discretion and has furloughed people that should be at work,” said Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, who chairs the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

“Clearly the administration is compromising our national security,” Turner told POLITICO. “I can only believe that it’s for politics.”

Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas agreed, suggesting the administration had been using furloughed workers as political pawns.

“There is a lot of concern that [the Pentagon has] intentionally been maximizing the number of civilian furloughs,” said Thornberry, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “It’s a mistake to play politics with the issue.”

And two other House Armed Services Subcommittee chairs, Reps. Martha Roby of Alabama and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, sent letters to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and President Barack Obama, urging swifter action.

Roby called on Obama and Hagel to use “every authority under the law to reduce the impact of the shutdown on our national defense.” And in his letter, Wilson argued that “further delay” in the legal review “may interrupt essential pay and allowances.”

A senior U.S. official brushed back that criticism Saturday, telling POLITICO “it took way too long for Justice to provide legal guidance on the Pay our Military Act to DoD.”

“It didn’t help that the Congress wrote the law in a convoluted manner,” the official added.

Meanwhile, a leading congressional Democrat said the whole situation could be resolved if House Republicans would just pass a “clean” continuing spending resolution, one stripped of provisions weakening Obamacare.

“We all want a good, strong reading of that bill, but there’s an easy way to address all of this kind of debate,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan.

The defense industry also appears to believe Hagel has wiggle room under the troop-pay law to call additional employees back to work, urging him to “use all the means” at his disposal to prevent contractors from having to halt their working building and overhauling weapons.

The heads of the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Defense Industrial Association said in a letter to Hagel that defense companies are planning to idle thousands of workers as a result of the lack of civilian inspectors who are required to be on site to monitor their projects.

The letter makes no mention of the troop-pay law but indicates the industry would like to see Hagel use any legislative authority he has to put those inspectors back on the job so contractors can get on with their work.

“It’s a crisis,” one defense lobbyist said of industry’s inability to move forward on major weapons programs without government inspectors there to monitor them.

“It’s intentionally being engineered by the administration to make national security an issue during the shutdown,” the lobbyist added, requesting not to be identified to offer a candid take on the issue.